Asus ROG Maximus V Gene Z77 w/ Intel i7 3770K Review

1. Introduction2. Intel i7 3770k3. Asus ROG Maximus V Gene Z774. Asus ROG Maximus V Gene Z77 (Super High Res Gallery)5. Bios and Overclocking6. Testing Methodology7. Synthetic: PCMark 78. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage9. Synthetic: 3DMark 1110. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark11. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201112. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit13. Synthetic: SSD Performance14. Real World: 3D Rendering15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Real World: HandBrake 9.517. Gaming: Resident Evil 5 (HD4000)18. Gaming: Far Cry 2 (HD4000)19. Gaming: Total War Shogun 2 (HD4000)20. Gaming: F1 2011 (HD4000)21. Power Consumption22. Closing Thoughts23. View All Pages

We had no problems getting a stable post immediately after the system build.

We used Corsair 2,400 GTX8 memory, and it defaulted initially to 1,333mhz as shown in the image above. Always worth checking the memory configuration immediately after a system build.

We immediately selected the XMP profile and rebooted. The system configured the Corsair 2,400mhz memory at 10-12-10-30 2T timings.

The extreme tweaker panel has plenty of options for fine tuning the hardware. We will look at this in more detail, shortly.

The advanced panel has a variety of settings to configure various aspects of the board, such as CPU, PCH and SATA devices.

The monitor panel has separate areas for voltage and temperature monitoring. The boot panel allows the user to disable the full screen image on post, and to configure the priority of the attached drives.

The tool panel can be used to flash the bios, and to save and load pre-configured overclock settings.

System Validation is available over here.

For this review we decided to have a look at the automatic overclocking options, built into the bios. CPU Level up has presets for 4.2 ghz, 4.4 ghz and 4.6 ghz.

The preset overclocking setting wasn't ideal, as it decided to downclock the memory again to 2,133mhz. We had to reload the XMP profile as shown above.

We also noticed that the voltage seemed a little higher than we would like, as the automatic setting pushed the core volts to 1.33. We backed down to 1.25 volts as highlighted above.

Above, system validation at 4.6ghz. You can look at the validation over here.

Higher speeds were possible, but we are using a highly affordable, £20 Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 so temperatures could quickly get out of control above 1.25 volts. We can't imagine anyone in the market for a Micro ATX board will want to push everything to breaking point anyway.

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